Day 28 (9/22 - Tues)

Today was a special day. Why, you ask? Because today is the birthday of some people who don't exist! Well, that's not quite true...they're very real felt-existence is why I gathered tonight at the Wade Center on Wheaton's campus with a cadre of fellow celebrants to celebrate the fictional birthdays of Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins, heroes of the Shire and of good-hearted folk everywhere! And that includes me and a good deal of you good-hearted readers, I suspect. In other words, today was Hobbit Day! Sept 22nd every year, so next year you can plan your own festivities so you aren't left out! (I particularly like the suggestion to celebrate by going barefoot all day and eating 6 meals...)



We ate yummsky cake, drank white-cranberryjuice-blend drinks, sang hobbitish songs, listened to archived recordings of J.R.R. Tolkien himself reading from various parts of his books, and took turns reading from our own favorite Tolkien passages ourselves.

I would like to state for the record that the works of Tolkien, expressly The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion are my favorite works of fiction pretty much ever. (I'm leaving Homer's Iliad out of this discussion for the moment...) The simple truth is that reading Lord of the Rings in 8th grade -- really, it was more like taking the grandest of journeys aboard the good ship Imagination -- changed my life. Tolkien is probably the largest single reason why I do what I do today. And not only are those books full of the power of the imagination-made-real, but they are full of the truth-made-real. Truth about the dangers of power, about the triumph of true hope, about the ever-present realities of loss and mortality, about the crucial value of the freedom of persons and of the will, and ultimately about the reality of what Tolkien calls the "Author of the Story" and the redemption of his story in the end. In a word, Beautiful.

Well, as they would say in ancient Rome if ancient Romans zapped themselves forward in time to read fantasy books in a language that they couldn't read:

Felix dies natalis vobis duobus, O hobbiti pleni animorum altissimorum!